Quotes About Survival

Don't you see that I cannot be composed, I cannot reconcile myself, because there is no other reality but loneliness for me and before I am dragged back into isolation I will clasp and grasp and claw in fright even at you without consciousness—even I—and I am afraid that I cannot survive if I have to go on into myself.

who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer

Personally I had the feeling as if I had fallen into an ocean of boiling water, and not knowing how to swim or get out in another manner, I tried with my legs and arms as best I could. I did not know what saved me; why I was not drowned or cooked alive. I have perhaps only one merit: I never gave up. But how could I give up in the middle of an ocean? ARNOLD SCHOENBERG IN 1947

A Gallagher Girl's real grades don't come in pass or fail—they're measured in life or death.

But in order to survive in this foreign world, I had to teach myself that love was very much like a painting. The negative space between people was just as important as the positive space we occupy.

What frightened me most was, I could no longer believe in my own life as a story. Everyone needs a story, a part to play in order to avoid the realization that life is without significance. How else do any of us survive? It's what makes life bearable, even interesting. When it becomes neither, people say you've lost the plot. Or just lost it.

It was hard not to wonder, as Whitney put the Tesla in park, whether this could possibly be true. The nature of disaster preparedness was so weird, as no one actually knew which disaster to be scared of. Steel doors, for example, weren't going to help with anthrax. Fifty years of gourmet freeze-dried foodstuffs, which a nearby project promised, weren't going to fix a bad marriage.

A defeated argument that refuses to be obliterated can remain very alive.

MAN, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.

COWARD, n. One who in a perilous emergency thinks with his legs.

Vultures devour the fallen. Hyenas destroy the weak. Humans kill that which they fear. Survive and be strong, or die, cornered by your prey, trembling because the night is dark.

My cousin tried to kill me today, he said. He realized that his voice held an edge of hysteria. She nearly succeeded. But I guess that's fair, since I was trying to kill her at the time.

If the worst comes to pass, these can be … discarded.

War had the effect of encouraging people to try to stay alive. Poverty, too. Survival was simply too hard-won to be given up lightly.

You can't become attached to things, not out here in the wild.

sad to say, not all men that die are killed by me.

Strange, to lock men up for thieving when the whole army lived on robbery. To dangle men for murder when they were all at the business of killing. What makes a crime in a time when men take what they please from who they please?

Yarvi soon learned only to sip the results, since unwrapping to piss in that cold was an act of heroism that earned grunted congratulations from the others, all the more heartfelt since everyone knew sooner or later they would have to present their own nethers to the searing wind.

Just keep in mind what Rudd Threetrees once told me. Let's us get them killed, and not the other way round.' Wonderful grinned. 'Best damn advice about war I ever heard.

Pardon me," said Glokta, wiping his running eye with a finger, "but I spent two years in the Emperor's prisons. I daresay, if I had known I'd be there half that long at the start, I would have made a more concerted effort to kill myself. Seven hundred days, give or take, in the darkness. As close to hell, I would have thought, as a living man can go. My point is this – if you mean to upset me, you'll need more than harsh language.

Vengeance can feel fine, but it's a luxury. It doesn't fill your belly, or keep the rain off.

Logen pulled the knife out of his boot and rammed the blade into the side of the giant's neck. He looked surprised, for just a moment, then blood dribbled from his mouth and down his chin. He let go of Logen's shirt, stumbled back, spun slowly round, bounced off one of the stones and crashed on his face. Seemed that Logen's father had been right. You can never have too many knives.

You could never have too many knives in Logen's experience,

Seemed that Logen's father had been right. You can never have too many knives.